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Kadek Wara Urwasi

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, IFAR and Urban Design

Kadek Wara Urwasi is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Research (IFAR), Monash University, Indonesia, and an affiliate of the Master of Urban Design program. An urban and political sociologist trained in sociology, urban design, and architecture, she studies how states govern inequality, urban transformation, and sustainability in Southeast Asian cities.

She is particularly interested in how formal institutions interact with political discretion, community power, and ideas of citizenship to produce uneven policy and development outcomes. Her work combines qualitative and comparative-historical methods, including archival research, interviews, field observation, policy analysis, and spatial analysis.

Her current research, Rule by Discretion: Informality, Development, and the Politics of City-Making in Jakarta, 1945–2022, builds on her doctoral work on the governance of informal settlements across post-independence, authoritarian, and democratic periods. It develops the concept of discretionary urbanism to explain how selective enforcement, political incentives, institutional ambiguity, and organised communities produce different outcomes within the same legal and administrative system. Her newer work extends these questions to environmental politics and sustainability governance, particularly the politics of waste, responsibility, and citizenship in urban Indonesia.

Wara completed her PhD in Sociology at Northwestern University in 2024. At Monash University, Indonesia, she teaches urban design, governance, and an interdisciplinary undergraduate common-curriculum unit.

More information

Urwasi, Kadek Wara. 2026. "Evict, Neglect, or Invest? Community Power and the Politics of Urban Informality Governance in Jakarta." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.70115.
Lechner, Alex M., Zahra Khairunnisa, Kadek Wara Urwasi, Eka Permanasari, Alyas Widita, Gitasanti Djais, Lillian Yee Kiaw Wang, Risty Khoirunisa, Suci Lestari Yuana, Ade Firmansyah, and et al. 2026. "Negotiating Extended Urbanisation: A Responsive Development Pathway for Banten, Indonesia." Land 15, no. 8: 1346. https://doi.org/10.3390/land15081346.
Urwasi, Kadek Wara, and Zahra Khairunnisa. 2026. "Mosaics of Insurgency: Grassroots Strategies and Global City Formation from Jakarta’s Margins." In Global Cities in Indonesia, edited by Henny Warsilah and Paulus Wirutomo. Singapore: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-95-4530-8_6.
Urwasi, Kadek Wara. 2026. Review of Jakarta: The City of a Thousand Dimensions, by Abidin Kusno. Asian Studies Review, February 2026, 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2026.2627637.
Urwasi, Kadek Wara. 2025. "Insurgent Planning versus Discretionary Urbanism in Jakarta." New Mandala, September 23, 2025.
Urwasi, Kadek Wara. 2023. "Contested Memories and the Production of Space in a Post-Conflict City: Ambon between Tolerance and Trauma." In Routledge Handbook of Urban Indonesia, edited by Deden Rukmana and Sonia Roitman, 130–143. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003318170-12.
Urwasi, Wara. 2015. "Cultural Landscape Urban Design: Preserving Local Identity in the Global Environment, Case Studies of Japanese and Malaysian Cities," in Encountering Asian New Horizons: Contesting and Negotiating in Fluid Transitions, ed. Francisia Seda, 111-126 (Bangkok: Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalangkorn University).
Urwasi, Wara. 2015. Spatial Segregation and Ethno-Religious Violence: A Lesson from Ambon, Indonesia. EDGS Working Paper 32, Equality Development and Globalization Studies, Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, Northwestern University.

For more up-to-date publication list, you can visit Wara's Google scholar page.